Section 5.1: The corporate sustainability journey
Section 5.2: The role of values in corporate citizenship
Section 5.3: Corporate culture and sustainability
There are many ways in which companies can implement their sustainability strategies, and structure vary across companies. Typically, sustainability crosses levels of management as well as functional groups.
For example, this diagram below show the lines of reporting at working group, executive, and board level:
For another example, see how the different functional departments of China Airlines are involved in sustainability.
Each level of management within the firm plays a different role in sustainability management, and addresses specific purposes. A few examples of the types of activities each level of management is involved in is given below:
Level of Management (from top to bottom)
Purpose in Sustainability Strategy
Board of directors & executive committee
Sets company vision
Defines company values and behaviors
Sets long-term strategy and key priorities for sustainability
Department heads
Set business unit/function action plans
Defines actions to be taken by the unit to deliver the strategy
Line management
Set specific action plans for local team
Defines specific role objectives for employees
Monitors and reviews sustainability actions
Sustainability team (can be at various levels)
Puts together annual performance report
Supports business functions
Conducts training
Provides feedback and suggestions to top management for improvements
As well as addressing sustainability through various structural set-ups, companies can also take an issues-based approach to managing sustainability issues. This can be important, in particular, if stakeholders are actively pressuring companies to tackle particular issues such as increasing gender diversity in the company or complying with anti-corruption rules. In such instances, sustainability officers and their departments collaborate closely with other departments:
In a large corporation, sustainability may additionally require structures that coordinate across subsidiaries, regions, functions, and committees, as seen in this example:
Corporate Sustainability Management 